Take 5 With Matthew Hart Founder & CEO of Soter Analytics
CORE Hub Perth is excited to be hosting another Tech Talk Tuesday on August 16 with none other than Hot 30 Awards Alumni Matthew Hart, Founder & CEO of Soter Analytics.
Soter Analytics is a global safety & productivity technology company developing advanced wearables and sensor free AI-driven products that help workplaces reduce the risk of exposure to movements that can cause workplace injuries.
As a former Mechanical and Reliability Engineer, Matthew began Soter Analytics with the vision that like machines, humans could avoid breakdowns with sensors and predictive analytics. This theory has evolved into the Soter products which help thousands of workers worldwide to be aware of their injury risk and take proactive steps to avoid potential injury.
Ahead of his Tech Talk, CORE sat down with Matthew to learn more about him, Soter’s Series A funding round and what he will be diving deep into during his Tech Talk.
CORE: What does your role entail within the business and what will your key focus be in the coming months?
Matthew: Soter Analytics recently closed a $16m Series A funding round with investors in the US and Europe. My role now is to actually step back a little bit and help the new team join Soter. We’re going from 40 employees at the start of the year to close to 80 by the end of 2022. With this rapid growth comes the risk of lack of focus and also diluting the amazing culture we built over the past 5-years - my goal is to prevent this from happening and hopefully be in an even stronger position by the end of the year.
CORE: What are 2-3 industry challenges you are facing/coming across?
Matthew: I think most people wouldn’t be surprised if the world enters a recession this year or next. With that will come a drying up of funding and tighter customer budgets. Our focus at Soter is on providing value to customers - helping them get more productivity while spending less money. In a tight spending environment, a recession should actually accelerate our sales.
Even with a lot of tech companies laying off staff in the past few weeks, it’s still a very tight labour market. Our team is very proud of the diversity we have in our team, including 53% of our team being female - which while we are hoping will continue to change, is still uncommon for tech startups.
We’re also launching training programs for junior developers which we see as an investment that we anticipate will pay off in the long term.
CORE: What are your thoughts around the pace of technological change in the resources sector?
Matthew: I think there is a lot of room for improvement. As of 2020, only 12% of companies in industries like manufacturing and construction have adopted technologies that enable predictive analytics. Thus, there is significant potential for improving employee safety by increasing the uptake of new technology.
CORE: What does innovation mean to you and your company?
Disrupt and challenge everything, including what our customers tell us. There’s a lot not-to-like about how companies and existing providers currently do to prevent injuries. It’s still very reactive. We do not accept this at Soter and are constantly improving the technology (and soon the business models!) that will significantly change how we think about protecting our workforces.
On a more micro-level, our team is very enabled to find better solutions and ways of working. Some of the ideas that have had the biggest impact on our business have come from the least likely people.
CORE: And finally, what are you most excited about covering in your upcoming session?
It’s hard to create a startup in Perth. The market is small and not diverse, resource companies are generally slow to adopt change, and it’s difficult to hire a tech team here that will let you compete with an international marketplace of great ideas, proven execution, and plenty of capital.
But it is possible. I’m excited to share some of the things we did to get us to the (still very early stage) that we are at now.
RSVP now and hear Matthew discuss “Why Perth encourages Startups to think small, and how the Estonia model might be the solution”
Matthew will be taking us through the journey of Soter Analytics and exploring the following:
The problems with launching a startup in a market dominated by the resources industry
How Estonia forces startups to look outside of the market, and why they have the most unicorns per capita
The story of Soter and how we left Perth early to focus on the world-wide opportunity